Research

I am researching Plato's chora and the basho of the Kyoto School at the Dutch Open Universiteit.

In the Timaeus, his account of creation, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato used a word for space, ‘chōra’, to indicate a third kind of reality besides eternal Being and everchanging Becoming. This concept did not fit in well with Greek philosophy and disappeared from view until rediscovered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s. Derrida’s khōra is a radical otherness, defying any naming or logic. It became an aspect of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. However, in 1926 the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō had already developed a concept of basho, Japanese for space, with a reference to Plato. Nishida’s basho was the space of Absolute Nothingness, related to Buddhist emptiness, and a cornerstone to the philosophy of the Kyoto School. The ancient Greek chōra, the postmodern khōra and the Buddhist basho overlap as being formless, but both Derrida and Nishida diverged from Plato’s concept. They found a ‘soft spot’ in Plato where they could situate their own brainchild, namely Western postmodern ‘deconstruction’ and the Japanese logic of basho. Related to formlessness and basho is the formless self, a Zen Buddhist concept not found in the West. How are chōra, khōra, and basho related to each other?

In Heart's Ease, Spirituality in the Music of John Tavener, June Boyce-Tillman has kindly allowed me to publish a chapter on 'John Tavener and Sacred Silence'. My contribution comes out of a number of presentations at the Tavener Study Days in Winchester, both as research and through musical performances inspired by Tavener. The contributors to this book include scholars, musicians, theologians, medical practitioners, informed listeners and practitioners in religious traditions. It includes case study material, empirical studies, philosophical, theological and theoretical contributions along with accounts from lived experience of the spirituality generated by Tavener’s music. Warmly recommended!

For a postgraduate degree (MPhil) at Canterbury Christchurch University, UK, I wrote a thesis on 'Star Music. The ancient idea of cosmic music as a philosophical paradox'. Here's the abstract: ‘Star Music’ regards the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic idea of heavenly harmony as a philosophical paradox: stars are silent, music is not. The idea of ‘star music’ contains several potential opposites, including imagination and sense perception, the temporal and the eternal, transcendence and theophany, and others. The idea of ‘star music’ as a paradox can become a gateway to a different understanding of the universe, and a vehicle for a shift to a new – and yet very ancient – form of consciousness. The ancient Greeks had a type of unitary consciousness, intermingling continually with a transpersonal dimension. This ancient state of consciousness was related to a musical understanding of the world, the Pythagorean-Platonic experience of the universe as an ordered cosmos. The research is approached from the angle of musicianship, exploring how music is reflected in the world of thought. By reflexive re-reading of the primary sources, new insights into the nature of musical consciousness are explored. The idea of ‘star music’ can be found throughout the history of music and thought in the West, including Plato’s works and that of other ancient philosophers, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era and the twentieth century up to contemporary New Age music. As a conclusion, the paradox of ‘star music’ is connected to an experience of a shared transcendent meaning of music, which can be present in the moment of a musical performance. In other words, ‘star music’ is a living paradox.' The complete thesis can be downloaded from https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/88649/star-music-the-ancient-idea-of-cosmic-musicas-a-philosophical-paradox or at https://www.academia.edu/ .

Tone-Zodiac of Ficino (Voss 2006, p. 186)

The text below is an excerpt from an essay written for the MA on Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred of Canterbury Christ Church University in 2015. The complete essay is available at https://www.academia.edu/.  'A tone-zodiac is a circle indicating the connections between the twelve signs of the zodiac and the tones of a musical scale. The oldest known tone-zodiac is found in Ptolemy’s Harmonics (second century CE). It is founded on the vision of Pythagoras of the heavens as a musical harmony. The tone-zodiac is not expressing the generally known ‘Harmony of the Spheres’, which is based on the planetary movements, but connects music with the properties of the ‘fixed stars’, the constellations of the zodiac. To each star sign a note is assigned, thus creating a circle of sounds and images. History has produced a small number of tone-zodiacs. The oldest known tone-zodiac appears in The Harmonics by the Alexandrian Ptolemy (c. 90 – c. 168 CE). He presents his tone-zodiacs in chapter 8 of book III of the Harmonics, written near the end of his life. He lays out a two-octave Pythagorean scale on a zodiac circle, noting that the rotating movements of the stars are all circular and regular and similar to the movements within the tone-system. In this form of the tone-zodiac, the octave (2:1) comes opposite in the circle, and so cuts it in two (1:2), which he considers “a great mystery”. Ptolemy says that “for this reason the effect of the planets is at its strongest in opposition, when they occupy diametrically opposed positions in the zodiac, and a similar relationship obtains among tones which are an octave apart from one another”. To the modern sense of consonance it seems strange to portray opposition by the octave and conjunction by the double octave. After Ptolemy ancient and medieval scholars in Western Europe discussed the connections between the planetary movements and the musical scale, but not to the zodiac. As more Greek sources became available in the second millennium CE the interest in ancient science, including astrology, grew. In the Italian Renaissance the tone-zodiac surfaces again. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) presents a tone-zodiac in his letter to the musician-philosopher Domenico Benivieni2. He uses a one-octave scale and places the major seventh as the opposite aspect. However, he manages to keep the Ptolemaic consonances of whole-tone (sextile), fourth (square) and fifth (trine) in the same place. Angela Voss argues that Ficino is advocating in his letter a tuning system in accordance with contemporary practice and the requirements of musicians, and which correlates more exactly with astrological law. As Ficino was a practising astrologer and a musician himself he may have chosen to adapt the Ptolemaic tone-zodiac to fit his own practice. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) tried to show that the geometry of the heavens is ruled by musical harmony, connected to the Platonic solids. In his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) he elaborates on Ptolemy’s tone-zodiac, based on the double-octave scale, introducing correspondences between the astrological aspects and the regular plane figures of geometry. Kepler also signals the problem of comparing the arithmetically divided circle of the Zodiac with the logarithmically divided string'. More on Roel Hollander's webpage on THE ASTROLOGICAL ZODIAC & TONALITY .